Each night, if Richard came back to me, I’d be ecstatic. If he didn’t, I’d want to die. I’d fall into a cab after the last act, get back to my studio, do a drawing of the Box, then hack out some children’s-book work I’d hustled on Craigslist, working until it was time to take the rattling J train back to the Lower East Side, brazen my way past the door guys, and do it all again.
“Gorgeous, we have something to discuss,” Richard texted one night. He always called me Gorgeous, a bit of asexual flirtation. He invited me to come over during the day. In daylight, nightclubs are beautiful in the same careless way women are in the morning, eyeliner smeared across their cheeks, hair in pillowy knots. Lights in a club reveal everything: the stains from spilled drinks, the shortcuts where a decorator had thought, Don’t worry, no one will notice in the dark.
The Box smelled like camphor. Richard lounged on one of the couches. On another couch lay a pile of silver dildos and giant commedia dell’arte masks. Onstage, two acrobats auditioned. They climbed a silk hammock, entwined themselves, and then unhooked their feet, dropping perilously close to the stage. Simon sat up front, wrapped in a blanket. He chomped away at a burrito, meat flecks falling from his mouth.
“You’re Mickey Mousing it!” he hollered at the aerialists in his Anglo-American accent. They sagged with disappointment against their silks, then packed and left. Simon started trash-talking them before they were out of earshot. Then he noticed me.
“Who’s she?” Simon asked.
“She’s our Toulouse-Lautrec.”
“Why haven’t I seen her before?”
His eyes were bloodshot and there were bits of lettuce stuck in his beard. I didn’t bother to remind him that we’d met.
“So, Molly . . . we have a big job for you,” said Richard, ignoring him. “We’re doing a big, big party, and we need a sixty-foot backdrop. We need it in three days. How’d you like seven thousand dollars?”
Seven thousand dollars was a fortune. The rent on my room in the roach-infested walk-up was five hundred a month.
Back at Fred’s loft, I brewed black coffee and spent the next three days on the floor, hunched over a giant piece of paper, to create a drawing that printers would then blow up to sixty feet wide. I drew an elaborate border of pigs. Cheerful, plump and evil, pigs were my symbol for the Box. They had a coke straw in each nostril, a champagne glass in each hand. It seemed an apt symbol for the coke-dumb bankers who composed half of the audience—oafs who shoved their way through the club, grabbing dancers’ asses, but never deigning to watch the show.
The Hammerstein Beauties threw themselves at these men. Girls before swine.
After the Box cut my check, I took the subway to Bergdorf’s. I entered that flower-bedecked palace wearing a filthy band shirt and a torn skirt. Striding past the glaring security guards, I took the escalator to the women’s shoe department. The salesmen ignored me.
My eyes settled on a pair of brutally high black peep-toes. I shook the shoes in a salesman’s face. His features softened. “Wonderful choice,” he lied.
I tried on the shoes, heart pounding at the sticker. Nine hundred dollars.
I will make money, I told myself, so that I can waste money. I gave him my credit card. Then they were mine. I felt drunk from the carelessness.
Back in my roachy apartment, I took off all my clothing. I put the shoes on in front of the mirror. I could barely stand. Louboutin soles are as red as Dorothy’s slippers (or a baboon’s ass, but I am a romantic). I wanted to wear them while walking down my own gold brick road. They hurt, but the pain felt like discipline. I was different now. The Box had paid me. I had money. I belonged there.
These shoes were the disguise I wore to smuggle myself into this new world.
No one had ever understood my art like Richard Kimmel did. Where others saw a bunch of topless cartoon girls, Richard saw weapons. He saw the anger that dragged my pen across paper, the cynicism that narrowed my chorines’ eyes. Richard saw the compulsion with which I filled each page with figures—stuffing in more and more life, until the paper swarmed like an ant colony. He saw my jaggedness, my insecurity. Neither of us came from money, but we lived in a world dominated by those who did. These people were born into a space far grander than the one we were able to occupy, and so we were forced to charm and flatter, to use our art to construct universes for their delectation. But I hated them for it. I suspect a small bit of him hated it too. Richard encouraged the knife edge in my work. I distorted my victims’ flaws until they swelled like ticks, all their defenses ripped away.
Richard didn’t see me as a girl—not in the world of spangled beauties who populated New York nightlife. He saw me as an artist—one who recognized the Box not just as a louche fantasyland, but as a kind of Roman colosseum of the downtown culture war.
Some nights I drank till the world sped before me like a cranked-up cartoon. My words came out slow and careful. I draped myself over the railing of one of the private VIP boxes and stared into the pit, where the bankers jerked and swayed. I hauled my head up. Onstage, Nik Sin performed naked with a three-foot-seven stripper, both of them painted blue like Smurfs. At one point in the act, Nik pulled out a sketchpad, parodying the scene in Titanic where Kate Winslet poses for Leo. “Draw me like one of your French girls,” the stripper mouthed. Nik scribbled her furiously. Then they pretended to fuck.
Nik sidled up to me during intermission, forcing his finger into my left nostril in way of greeting. “I was pretending to be a creepy artist like you,” he said.
The light flickered. Nik left. A famous porn performer and dancer came into the booth with an aerialist and a customer. The customer poured lines of cocaine onto the back of his hand. We snorted it. I titled my head back and let it bleed bitter down my throat.
I was kissing the porn performer greedily while the aerialist kissed the customer. The light glowed around me, incandescent, the world rapid but the night feeling like it would last forever.
I left just before my legs stopped working.
“Good-bye, honey bunny,” the customer said with a grin. In the veiled light of the booth, his face morphed into a demon’s. I nodded and staggered out.
The Box was famous. All my friends begged for invites, and the New York Post’s Page Six guessed which celebrities did which drugs inside. The Box was envied, desired, and hated all at once. Everyone I knew wanted to hear about it. I had never been part of a scene where admission was so coveted, or the stakes so high. But with scandal comes reaction, and soon the community board began fighting to yank the club’s liquor license.
I knew enough to refuse media requests, but Time Out New York asked to print pages from my Box sketchbook. That seemed innocuous enough. I sent them a watercolor of girls wearing gas masks, multiarmed and entwined.
When the magazine came out, Richard called me. Stress hollowed his voice. A few days before, they’d had another meeting with the community board. The Box was licensed as a supper club, but it stayed open till four o’clock in the morning. When community members confronted Simon about this fact, he said that the class of people he knew ate supper at four A.M. This did not go over well.
“Are you a fucking idiot?” Richard hissed at me. “The city wants to shut us down, and you show we have nipples out in the club?” New York law required topless dancers to wear pasties. Burlesque dancers all over the city flouted this rule, but none of them were as high profile as the Box.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t think about it.”
“And for fucking Time Out! I want you in W!”
I held my tongue. I didn’t want to be exiled from the club, or lose my frail hold on the high world. When he hung up, I lay on my stomach on Fred’s couch, breathing hard into the fabric.
I spent more and more nights at the Box. Outside the club, I fell into New York’s frenzy. I was photographed for magazines, staring into the camera’s insect eye as I once had as a model. But I was no longer girl flesh—I was me. The morning news did stories o
n Dr. Sketchy’s. A T-shirt company gave me my own line and flew me out to Hollywood to launch it. At the party, the publicist guided the starlet Bai Ling and the boy-starlet Boo Boo Stewart over. We embraced, letting go just after the cameras stopped. But Buck Angel showed up and hugged me for real.
A fashion blogger who had just moved to New York from Melbourne, Gala Darling had a posh voice, stick-straight magenta hair, and the characters of Geek Love tattooed on her biceps. During her first week in the city, I took her to the Box. She wrote about Raven’s hymns to cocaine on LiveJournal. New York magazine quoted her post. Remembering how the drawings in Time Out had infuriated Richard, I begged her to delete her LiveJournal post before he could follow New York’s links to it and connect her to me.
Together, Gala and I went to a party for Louis Vuitton. I prepared with great care: sequined dress, Louboutins. Gala showed up on the corner of Houston in a cerulean tutu. We had a tense moment at the door. Would the girl see our names on the list? Some New Yorkers were legendary door crashers: they viewed lying past guest lists as a test of fortitude. I was not one of them. When I wasn’t on the list, all I wanted was to apologize to the door girl and slink away. But miracle! Our names were found! Gala and I strode into the room. Like all fashion parties, the Louis Vuitton party was a sort of video game. We had three goals: Gulp as much champagne as possible. Get a swag bag. Pose for photos.
I stood around, trying to look haughty, too scared to talk to anyone. I willed the photographer to turn his flash in our direction. Why even come if he wouldn’t record our presence? Eventually, he noticed us. Hands on hips, Gala and I snapped into our glamorous molds. He took two photos and turned away.
After thirty minutes we left, toting champagne headaches and swag bags full of gummy bears and conditioner packets. I dumped them into the trash.
Later, Gala wrote up the party on her blog. On the Internet, we were chosen, enviable, fabulous. She sold back the myth of our enjoyment, sandwiched in between ads.
In New York, before the crash, this was all there was.
The media had become stupid with money. Web 2.0 brought with it the intoxicating delusion that we could all be wealthy microcelebrities. Thoughtful work was for idiots. There were gilded prizes to be seized.
Gawker turned a bland dating columnist into the era’s Becky Sharp, making her famous by eviscerating her online for her naked ploys for attention, then scooping up all the clicks for themselves. Video editors donned white suits and were flown to Vegas on private jets, working-class craftsmen transformed into brands, traveling to a branded city on a branded plane. One friend made a Tumblr of crowdsourced photos of bacon. He got a book deal for a hundred thousand dollars. Facebook took over the New Museum and gave five thousand people panama hats and tiny apple pies. Where did the money come from? Who cares? I thought, stuffing a minipie into my face.
Outside New York, books like Rich Dad, Poor Dad spread the lie that, for the middle classes, money could come from nowhere. They didn’t reveal that this trick only works for the rich. Buy a house on credit, flip it, buy another—so the pundits counseled. Don’t think. Don’t wait. Everyone was getting rich. You’d be an idiot to hesitate. Don’t miss out. In New York, we were the credit we would draw against. We were no longer writers or artists. We were start-ups. Branding may have been for cattle, but we were all brands. We would get book deals movie deals angel funds venture capital cash cash cash and never think that someday we’d have to earn it back.
One night Richard ordered me to duplicate Raven O’s tattoos on the bodies of the waitstaff. Raven’s torso was a muscled wonder, emphasized by stars and tiger stripes, and the words American Boy stretched across his improbable abdomen. Each waiter would take off his shirt and stand, bored, while I daubed paint over his perfect back. The job took me eight hours.
I stuck around for the show. A guest came up to me. “I can get you into the VIP section,” he bragged. He was rotund, with a bowl cut and a suit.
“I work here,” I answered.
“Doing what?”
I gestured to a waitress painted with my handiwork.
He chortled to his friends. “Can you body-paint me?”
“Sure. If you give me a hundred dollars.” I made myself sound bored. You always get more money if you sound bored.
He led me to a private box filled with his friends. I unbuttoned his shirt. His belly was a furry dome. His chest rose with anticipation.
I took out a Sharpie and drew a smiley face on his stomach.
Smiling, I shoved out my hand.
He dropped a hundred into my palm, too embarrassed to protest.
Rose Wood was dressed as a caricature of a sex worker: lime-green tube dress, clear platforms, pounds of fake hair. She’d just gotten her tits done, and the bags sat proud atop her well-developed pectorals. Beneath her glitter-caked eyelids, Rose had a handsome, stoic face. Her jaw was square, and you could see the tension of someone who had fought hard but wasn’t going to show it.
During another act, Rose walked the floor, opening audience members’ beer bottles with her asshole. While she did it, she wore the same cold dignity on her face.
For this act, Rose led an actor onstage. In his banker’s suit, he looked identical to any man in the audience.
From the wings, Raven whispered the banker’s thoughts.
She’s so beautiful, the banker said to himself. No one at the office would think I was wild enough to get a prostitute. But I am.
Rose started to undress the banker. She unbuttoned his shirt with the movements of a lover, not a worker, with poetry and pain. As she removed each gray piece of his suit, she hung it up on a coatrack.
She’s so neat. Not like my bitch of a wife, the banker thought.
Rose led him to the bed. She cuffed his hands to the bed frame, with his head pointed toward the audience.
“Naughty! Kinky!” the banker purred.
She straddled him. She pulled her dress up, over her breasts.
Oh. She has a dick, the banker thought. But she’s hot. I don’t care.
They mimed sex. The banker screamed in pleasure. The bed jumped.
Afterward, the banker lay back, stupid in his satiation. Rose pulled off her wig. She was bald underneath. Her gestures were graceful, slow, as if the blue stage lights were water. Her shoulders slumped with exhaustion. She lit a cigarette.
Raven began to sing.
“This is not a love song.”
From behind the coatrack, Rose pulled out a knife.
“I’m going over to the other side. I’m happy to have lots to hide . . .”
Rose walked back to the bed. We couldn’t see the banker’s face, but we could feel him there, grinning with satisfaction. He was brave. He was a rebel. He had just been fucked liquid. He was a man. Rose straddled him, hiding the knife behind her back.
Then she raised the knife. The banker’s head jerked with surprise.
Didn’t they have a nice time? Didn’t he pay her? Weren’t they friends?
Then Rose brought down the knife.
The lights went to strobe.
In that confusion of smoke and flash, Rose stabbed the banker over and over. Blood flew. Rose rode the banker as she killed him. Her face shone orgasmic. She bit her lips with joy.
Finally, the banker’s body lay flaccid.
Rose cut off his head.
The lights went back to blue. Spent, Rose rose from the bloody bed. She pulled off the tube dress to the rhythm of Raven’s song. Then she stood naked in the middle of the stage and stared hard out at the crowd. She showed her breasts, her penis, the cold dignity on her face. She stared at every motherfucker in the audience as if she had tied him to that bed and stabbed him too, and she wanted to let him know he deserved it.
Slowly, Rose put on the banker’s suit. In class drag, she walked off the stage.
As she left, she tossed her cigarette onto the bed. It went up in flames, banker and all.
Then, in 2008, the stock market crashed. When
it did, Simon Hammerstein was one of three people who rang the opening bell.
New York had been shiny the way a bubble is the moment before it bursts. The skin of the city was stretched taut. The colors were bright, and all we could see were our own reflections.
In that one morning in 2008, it all disappeared.
After the market crashed, the press started to turn on Simon. It began with the Porcelain Twinz, former star performers at the Box. The Twinz were near-identical, faux-albino sisters who penetrated each other with glass dildos while elegantly smoking what they claimed were herbal cigarettes.
One morning, they posted a blog full of accusations: Simon had pressured them into sex. The dressing rooms were filled with dog shit, and the Box’s management snorted coke like they were vacuum cleaners. Soon, the New York Times ran a story about their accusations. Other papers followed. Simon denied it, of course, pointing to an HR handbook no one I knew had ever seen. As if to prove himself incapable of harassment, he teased news of his imminent wedding.
I sat drawing in a curtained VIP box. The stage curtains rose to show Raven, naked except for a cock ring, in front of a line of Hammerstein Beauties wearing trench coats and fedoras. They held yellow legal pads, like cartoon members of the press.
“Rape me,” Raven sang. “Rape me, my friend.”
In June, Barack Obama won the Democratic primary, and the U.S. presidential race narrowed to him and John McCain. Obama was America’s first serious black presidential candidate, as well as being intellectual, urbane, literary, and dorky, qualities diametrically opposite to those of George W. Bush. In 2008, this seemed to promise an intelligent, transparent, even leftist way of running the country.
In retrospect, these attributes seem more like cultural signifiers, as vapid in their way as those of a Midwesterner who wanted to share a beer with Bush.
The Box threw Obama fund-raisers, despite the mockery of the press. My mother and I volunteered for Obama too, spending hours every week calling up people to ask them to register to vote. I knew how irritating we were, but I didn’t care. For the first time, my mother and I agreed on politics.
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